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Union types in C# 15

devblogs.microsoft.com

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Re: Union types in C# 15

#31

Post by gib444 »

JCTheDenthog wrote: post #22
gib444 wrote: post #21

Is C# a great language trapped in a terrible ecosystem? ie would masses use C# if it existed in another ecosystem? Or is it becoming a ball-of-mud/bad language compared to its contemporaries? (Honest questions. I have never used .NET much. I'm curious)

Depends on what you mean by ecosystem, it hasn't been trapped on Windows for about a decade now. The variety of third party libraries available is quite good, while the standard library is robust enough that you don't need NPM nonsense like LeftPad and IsEven and IsNumber. Are there particular things about the ecosystem that you worry about (or have heard about)? Biggest complaint I would have is that it seems like m…

Yup, the commercial libraries. That's pretty big. It's nice the standard library has lots of goodies, but I doubt many projects in reality are zero-dependency

(The amount of times I hear "the standard lib is great!" seems more to attempt to defend the plethora of commercial libraries, more than anything)

The community feels rather insular too? The 9-5 dayjob types with employers who don't understand or embrace open source? At my age I can respect that though

And is Postgresql a 2nd-class citizen? If so, your boss will tell you to use SQL Server surely?

I guess it's hard to get a grasp on the state/health of .NET as to me it seems 99.99999% of the code is in private repos companies, as it's not a popular choice for open source projects. Which itself seems like a proxy signal though

Re: Union types in C# 15

#32

Post by pjmlp »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #11

Is this the last of the F# features to be migrated into C#? What a missed opportunity. I think really F# if you combine all of its features, and what it left out, was the way. Pulling them all into C# just makes C# seem like a big bag of stuff, with no direction. F#'s features, and also what it did not included, gave it a style and 'terseness', that still can't really be done in C#. I don't really get it. Was a funct…

Microsoft's management has always behaved as if it was a mistake to have added F# into Visual Studio 2010, and being stuck finding a purpose for it.

Note that most of its development is still by the open source community and its tooling is an outsider for Visual Studio, where everything else is shared between Visual Basic and C#.

With the official deprecation of VB, and C++/CLI, even though the community keeps going with F#, CLR has changed meaning to C# Language Runtime, for all practical purposes.

Also UWP never officially supported F#, although you could get it running with some hacks.

Similarly with ongoing Native AOT, there are some F# features that break under AOT and might never be rewritten.

A lost opportunity indeed.

Re: Union types in C# 15

#33

Post by CharlieDigital »

gib444 wrote: post #21

Is C# a great language trapped in a terrible ecosystem? ie would masses use C# if it existed in another ecosystem? Or is it becoming a ball-of-mud/bad language compared to its contemporaries? (Honest questions. I have never used .NET much. I'm curious)

C# is a language that serves many masters and if you trace the origin of its featureset, you can see why each was created. Take the `dynamic` keyword: created to support interfacing with COM interop easier[0].

It serves many audiences so it can feel like the language is a jack of all trades and master of none (because it is) and because it is largely backwards compatible over its 20+ years of existence.

That said, I think people make a mountain out of a molehill with respect to keyword sprawl. Depending on what you're building, you really only need to focus on the slice of the language and platform you're working with. If you don't want to use certain language features...just don't use them?

I think it excels in a few areas: web APIs and EF Core being possibly the best ORM out there. For me, it is "just right". Excellent platform tooling, very stable platform, very good performance, hot reload (good, but not perfect), easy to pick up the language if you already know TypeScript[1]; there are many reasons it is a good language and platform.

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/advanced-top...

[1] https://typescript-is-like-csharp.chrlschn.dev/

Re: Union types in C# 15

#35

Post by gib444 »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #33
gib444 wrote: post #21

Is C# a great language trapped in a terrible ecosystem? ie would masses use C# if it existed in another ecosystem? Or is it becoming a ball-of-mud/bad language compared to its contemporaries? (Honest questions. I have never used .NET much. I'm curious)

C# is a language that serves many masters and if you trace the origin of its featureset, you can see why each was created. Take the `dynamic` keyword: created to support interfacing with COM interop easier[0]. It serves many audiences so it can feel like the language is a jack of all trades and master of none (because it is) and because it is largely backwards compatible over its 20+ years of existence. That said, I…

> EF Core being possibly the best ORM out there

Is it good at the wrong thing? Eg compare to strongly-typed query generators

Re: Union types in C# 15

#37

Post by throwuxiytayq »

gib444 wrote: post #21

Is C# a great language trapped in a terrible ecosystem? ie would masses use C# if it existed in another ecosystem? Or is it becoming a ball-of-mud/bad language compared to its contemporaries? (Honest questions. I have never used .NET much. I'm curious)

It's a very nice language embedded in a very nice ecosystem. There is no catch, really.

Re: Union types in C# 15

#38

Post by CharlieDigital »

gib444 wrote: post #35
CharlieDigital wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C# is a language that serves many masters and if you trace the origin of its featureset, you can see why each was created. Take the `dynamic` keyword: created to support interfacing with COM interop easier[0]. It serves many audiences so it can feel like the language is a jack of all trades and master of none (because it is) and because it is largely backwards compatible over its 20+ years of existence. That said, I…

> EF Core being possibly the best ORM out there Is it good at the wrong thing? Eg compare to strongly-typed query generators

It is a strongly-typed query generator?

Re: Union types in C# 15

#39

Post by JMKH42 »

jcmontx wrote: post #34

So they finally took all of the cool features from F#. What's missing? The pipe operator for railway oriented programming?

type providers, units of measure, active patterns, complete type inference.

Not sure I would want the last thing in C#, I think having boundaries at the function signature for that.

Re: Union types in C# 15

#40

Post by NanoCoaster »

LunicLynx wrote: post #28
NanoCoaster wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely agree. Modern C# language design feels very much lacking in vision or direction. It's mostly a bunch of shiny-looking language features being bolted on, all in ways that make the language massively more complex. Just look at this feature: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/whats-new/cs... Was this needed? Was this necessary ? It's reusing an existing keyword, fine. It's not hard to understand.…

You are looking at it from what you know about C#, the goal is how can you reduce (delete) all this to make the language more accessible. For you it may be fine to write: List strs = new List (); And sure if you have been using C# for years you know all the things going on here. But it shouldn’t be an argument that: List strs = []; Is substentionally easier to grasp. And that has been the theme of all changes. The ex…

I'm 100% on board with the [] syntax. I'm not on board with adding the syntax for passing arguments to the constructor within that syntax.

I agree that = [] is perfectly fine syntax. But I would definitely argue that:

[with(capacity: values.Length * 2), ..

is non-intuitive and unnecessary. What other language is there that has this syntax? Alternatively, is this a natural way of writing this? I wouldn't say so.

My main language in my free time is Rust, a few years ago it was F#. So, I'm absolutely open to other syntax ideas. But I feel that there has to be a direction, things have to work together to make a language feel coherent.

Another example would be Clojure, which I started learning a few months ago (before we all got swept up in AI FOMO :D). Clojure as a language feels very coherent, very logical. I'm still a beginner, but every time I learn something about it, it just makes sense. It feels as if I could have guessed that it works this way. I don't get that feeling at all in many of the new features of C#.

> The example you point out is the advanced case, someone only needs in a very specific case. It does not have a lot todo with learning the language.

I disagree. When learning the language, you're going to have to read other people's code and understand it. It's the same basic principle, but, I'd argue, much worse in C++. Yes, in theory, you don't have to understand SFINAE and template metaprogramming and (now) concepts and all those things. You could just work in a subset of C++ that doesn't use those things. But in practice, you're always going to have issues if you don't.

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